“When novae or supernovae go off, they are usually followed up with many telescopes, and therefore we know a great deal about the “after” of these explosions”, Carles Badenes, an astronomer at the University of Pittsburgh, who was not involved in the study, told the Verge.
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Polish scientists, observing the night sky from Chile, managed to collect these images of a hibernating star exploding, gaining insight into how these eruptions evolve.
More information: Przemek Mróz et al. What is a Classical Nova explosion?
According to this hypothesis, after a classical nova erupts, the rate of mass transfer between the two stars is elevated for centuries. This occurs when two stars are orbiting each other. This will continue for a while before the process starts all over again. A white dwarf is a remain of a common star and is locked in an orbit cycle with a “red dwarf” which is an active and regular star. However, the scientists still did not find out when a white dwarf would turn into a nova.
NASA’s Fermi Space Telescope was able to capture the exact moment of a nova, called Classical Nova.
“From time to time such systems undergo large-amplitude brightenings”. Nonetheless, the white dwarf stays in position minus the significant amount of matter.
“The entire system survives the nova explosion, so the whole process starts again”.
The classical novae of binary star systems are thought to be cyclical explosions that repeat every 10,000 to a million years. But after the explosion, the “feeding” is higher and more stable. However, the 2009 explosion offered scientists the opportunity to observe the explosion and the aftermath. It’s a parasitic relationship in which the dead star slowly feeds off its living counterpart, siphoning matter away and occasionally flaring up in stellar outbursts known as dwarf novae.
‘What we observed is that before the eruption, the mass transfer rate in the binary was very low and was unstable. Which means the binary system changed after the classical nova occurred and the hibernation theory is supported.
An artist’s depiction of a classical nova as seen from space.
The smaller explosions seen in the years leading up to the big eruption of Nova Centauri 2009 are called dwarf novas.
The discovery has stimulated a conversation between astronomers from around the world, as BBC reports, an astronomer from the Southhampton University believes is still too early to make assumptions. Approximately six days before the explosion, there was a fluctuation in brightness.
“We’re not saying that our observations “confirm” a hibernation scenario, rather “they are in accord with hibernation predictions”.
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“These are the brightest and most frequent stellar eruptions in the galaxy, and they’re often visible to the naked eye”, said Przemek Mróz, the lead author of the study, which is detailed online in the August 17 edition of the journal Nature.
